Automate your social posts through IFTTT

As avid readers would have noted, I often say that putting together great content on your blog is half the work done.

The remaining half is getting the content to the right audience. This audience is everywhere. It consists of multiple people with varying degrees of knowledge, technology prowess, and of diverse interests. You always open multiple connections to this audience, since you never know who prefers which tool/platform/medium.

Social media is one of the most powerful channels, which has the brightest future of all.

Social networks push the conversation to the reader’s arena. You engage the readers at their own turf by responding to comments, sharing bits and pieces not available on the website, or by doing other things that humans tend to do in company of other humans.

Of same importance is the fact that you increase your social signals by being active on social media. The social links may generate more than their bit of traffic.

You could while away your time on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to spread those messages from your posts. But if you feel your time can be better utilized, we have seen options to automate stuff here in earlierposts. IFTTT beats all that and looks beautiful while at it. Let us look at what and how you can automate your social posts through IFTTT.

The Case for IFTTT: Just what is IFTTT!?

Social networks are about people. Though I had tried dlvr.it in the past, I tried to keep this manual through something like Hootsuite. This saved me some time, but I was getting highly inefficient at posting everywhere. Again, why care about everywhere? Because of the simple reason that 2-3 websites are still someway to go in building up a credible audience, and until that happens you have to keep the conversation on. I receive very less feedback, and that is received thanks to social media. So it is extremely important for me to maintain conversation on multiple forums, but I was not really good at it. Fast forward to IFTTT.

Aptly named If There Then That (IFTTT), the premise of the platform is simple. Take something that you have done in some part of the web, and deliver it to the other corner without your intervention. Though it is still in beta, for obvious reasons this is gaining a lot of popularity.

How to use IFTTT?

In IFTTT you have ‘Ingredients’ like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, etc. and you create ‘Recipes’ with them. The recipes will take care of listening to what you do in the source (if you get something there), then IFTTT gets that and passes it on. As you might imagine, this goes in a lot of places using automation. The configuration itself is fairly simple, and beautiful looking. You just click on a no. of options to

select source (e.g. Facebook, RSS feed of your website, Twitter)

specify the criteria for selecting posts in the source (e.g. only if posts contain a #technosanct hashtag)